From The Depths – Dediblade PID Slaving Tutorial

If you’ve ever wanted to hook your dediblades to a PID, then this is the guide for you.

Preface

Note: Credit goes to TheOrangeNinja

Howdy! As many of you may be aware, the recent 2.4.1 update, while massively improving the AI of From the Depths, has rendered the extremely popular gunship AI by Draba disabled. For awhile, I thought this made interfacing dediblades with the PIDs impossible, but fortunately, the new control channels our lord and savior Nick added actually makes hooking the two up a relatively simple process. 

Pictured here are several ships of my Sky Navy. Each used to run on Draba’s script (save the dreadnought, she’s still under construction), but now all propellers answer directly to the ships’ PID’s.

Slaving

Right! On to business. To start, you may want to set up a basic testing drone, just to ensure you’ve got the setup procedure down. It isn’t necessary, but I find it helps to learn on a basic craft before applying a concept to a larger one. It’s important to keep in mind that, unlike jets, dediblades cannot multitask for multiple PIDS (say, generating altitude and rolling the craft simultaneously) so in order to cover the three basic axes of pitch, roll, and altitude, you’re going to need 5 seperate propellers at least.

This is the basic drone I used – 4 roll, 2 pitch, 1 altitude.

Step one: Set up your PID controller. For now, you can ignore the tuning – what we’re interested in is the output settings. Typically, you’d select propulsion pitch, propulsion roll, etc., but dediblades don’t respond to these commands. Instead, pick one of the outputs A, B, or C. Remember which letter you’ve picked for each axis, because you’ll need to select it for each corresponding propeller.

Next, move on to the propeller you wish to slave to your PID. Typically, the ABC axes aren’t visible here, but checking the “show misc axes” will reveal them.

Finally, crank whatever axis you selected in step one up to full. Important note: Roll blades on the left side of the craft, as well as pitch blades behind the center of mass, are going to require negative settings as opposed to positive ones.